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Kane and Brigid watched as the Apache dropped down to the ground, landing gently on the dirt strip between fields, its rotor blades whirring in a blur. As soon as it was down, the two Cerberus rebels hurried toward it in a crouched run, keeping their heads and limbs well below the height of those rotating blades, even though they knew there was room to maneuver below them. Too many times, the drag created by the rotors had wrong-footed a man and created a shockingly swift accident as the fast-spinning rotors became like knives cutting the air.
Kane drew back the side door. Brigid tottered inside with Kane just a couple of steps behind her. As soon as Kane was in, Brigid shouted, “Clear!” and the helicopter ascended into the skies once more.
Piloting the craft was a large dark-skinned man in his late thirties, with a shaved head and gunslinger’s mustache. He was wearing a shadow suit that matched those worn by his passengers. Though large, the man was all muscle—accentuated by the tight fit of the shadow suit—without an ounce of fat on his body. This was Grant, who had served as Kane’s field partner all the way back to their days as Magistrates and with whom he had been partnered ever since. Grant was a proficient hand-to-hand combatant, as well as being trained in the use of most ballistic weapons. He was also a phenomenal pilot—Kane would argue he was the greatest pilot that Cerberus would ever know...excluding himself, of course.
“So, you guys pick up anything good while you were shopping?” Grant asked in his rumbling-thunder voice as Kane drew the side door closed.
Kane shrugged. “Trouble, a few stones. The usual.”
“Stones,” Grant muttered, shaking his head. “Like we’ve not had enough of that for one lifetime.”
Kane and Brigid had to agree.
* * *
THE TRIO ARRIVED back at the Cerberus redoubt two hours later. The redoubt was built into one of the mountains in the Bitterroot range in Montana, where it was hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base which had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust of 2001. A peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains in the years since that nuclear conflict, with their dark, mysterious forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now, the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago.
Inside, the redoubt featured state-of-the-art technology despite its rough exterior. The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study. The staff relied on two orbiting satellites at their disposal—the Keyhole commsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humankind. Gaining access to the satellites had taken long man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were tucked beneath camouflage netting around the redoubt, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range and chattering with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the staff in residence a near-limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth, as well as providing near-instantaneous communication with field teams across the globe, such as Kane’s team, which was designated CAT Alpha.
They convened in the Cerberus meeting room, a rarely used lecture theater with several stepped rows of fixed seats. Kane and Brigid had showered and changed clothes, so Grant was already sitting when they entered, his massive frame almost too much for the regular-size seat. Three other people were in the room—Lakesh, Donald Bry and Reba DeFore—and all were dressed in the standard white duty uniform.
Mohandas Lakesh Singh was a physics and cybernetics expert who was the head of the Cerberus organization. A man of medium height, he appeared to be in his fifties, with a dusky complexion and vivid blue eyes that shone like sapphires when he addressed you. His black hair was slicked back away from his forehead, showing a few threads of gray, especially at the sides above the ears. Lakesh had an aquiline nose and a refined mouth, and his breadth of knowledge was second to none, except perhaps Brigid’s. Though he was, for all intents, a man in his fifties, Lakesh was in fact far older than that—he had been born in the twentieth century, but thanks to cryogenics and organ replacement, he had lived past his two-hundred-and-fiftieth year and was still going strong. Amazingly, Lakesh had been one of the original scientists involved in the Cerberus facility based at this redoubt in the twentieth century, a research project developing and investigating the applications of a fixed-point teleportational device called the mat-trans. The mat-trans was still in operation all these years on, although it was only one of a number of transportation options that the Cerberus personnel employed.
Beside Lakesh stood Donald Bry, Lakesh’s right-hand man and the unofficial second-in-command of the Cerberus operation. In his thirties, Donald had an unruly mop of ginger curls atop his head and a look of perpetual worry on his features. Donald’s field of expertise was computers, but he was also knowledgeable about most of the general goings-on relating to Cerberus and its field operations, including communications and the intricacies of the biolink transponders.
The final person in the room was Reba DeFore, a stocky, bronze-skinned woman with ash-blond hair, which she had clipped back from her face in an elaborate French twist. DeFore was the redoubt’s medical expert, and she had patched up Kane, Grant and Brigid more times than she cared to count.
“Grant tells me you ran into an old friend out in Saskatchewan,” Lakesh began after welcoming Kane and Brigid. They had been gone for four days.
Kane nodded gravely. “Ullikummis. Not quite back, but his devotees are trying real hard to hasten the second coming.”
“Wrong savior,” Brigid corrected him. “They were using the old stone seeds,” she elaborated, “that budded from his body, charging them with human blood.”
“Sacrifices?” Lakesh asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” Brigid said. “At least, none so far. The blood of pilgrims gave the thing life, but it seemed mindless—like it didn’t have any purpose. It just stumbled around draining blood from anyone who stepped into its grasp.”
“And we blew it up before it could get very far with that,” Kane added.
Lakesh nodded solemnly. “A worrying development, dear friends,” he said.
“Were any of you hurt?” DeFore asked as the room went silent.
“I took a few knocks,” Kane admitted, “and Brigid took a few, too—”
“When you knocked me to the floor,” Brigid pointed out.
“—but we’re all good, I think,” Kane finished.
DeFore proposed checking them over anyway and, using a portable medical kit, accessed their transponders for a full rundown on their current health. The shadow suit had protected Kane from most of the knocks he had taken at the hands of the deluded pilgrims, and other than a bruised arm, Brigid had got off scot-free.
While DeFore was sterilizing the few scrapes and grazes Kane had taken during the frenetic conflict, the group discussed their mission in detail. As they reached the wrap-up, Brigid recalled one thing that had stood out as possibly important.
“A few people have mentioned something about a storm out to the west over the past few days,” she said. “Sounded vicious, like it’s taken some lives.” She shrugged.
Donald Bry brought up a map on the projector screen that dominated the wall behind the stage. Using the old designations, west of Saskatchewan was Alberta or British Columbia. “This is pretty much no-man’s-land now,” Bry stated as he indicated those areas.
“Well out of reach of the baronies,” Kane pointed out as he eyed the map.
Lakesh looked at Kane querulously. “Something on your mind, Kane?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Kane said. “People were speaking about this storm like it was a big deal. A big deal well away from the baronies, where there wouldn’t likely be much in the way of organized help.”
Lakesh took a slow breath as he looked at the map. “We could send out a rescue party, see if anyone needed our assistance,” he said.
“Helping people is what we do,” Grant reminded everyone. “Can’t always be fighting crazy aliens and nutty priests.”
“It’s a lot of territory,” Bry argued. “Do you have any idea whereabouts this storm hit?”
Brigid’s red-gold locks cascaded about her face as she shook her head. “We had more important concerns at the time.”
“Would a satellite scan find evidence?” Kane suggested.
“It may,” Lakesh confirmed. “It really depends on how much damage the storm created and whether there was any notable habitation there to begin with. If it’s trashed, unpopulated territory we’d be hard-pushed to confirm it from the air.”
Kane fixed Lakesh with his no-nonsense stare. “Look,” he said.
Lakesh nodded once, accepting Kane’s challenge. He had organized Cerberus to help people, and while a storm was not the kind of threat he had had in mind, helping those in danger or trouble was the operation’s remit. They would use the satellites to scan the area to the west of the sacred temple of the stone god, and maybe—just maybe—find a place where help was needed.
Designated Task #016: Sleep
Sleep has been prescribed for all citizens at an optimum 6.2 hours a day. Sleep occurs when a citizen is not on shift, and this may be in the day or night. After 6.2 hours an alarm alerts the citizen to wake, after which their routine begins again.
I note that the sleep patterns of my immediate neighbors in this residential block are different to my own, accounting for their own shifts at their designated tasks.
My bed is soft and uncomfortable, the padding inadequate and the base structure of the sofa which it converts from pushing against my body as I toss and turn. I have no one to report this to.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_f51e8b75-ecfa-53d0-bf57-3e872ee6477d)
“Storm,” Brewster Philboyd announced emotionlessly.
“Storm,” Lakesh agreed.
The two of them were sitting in office chairs in the Cerberus operations room. The room was a vast space with high ceilings and pleasing indirect lighting. Two aisles of computer terminals faced a giant screen on which material could be flagged. A giant Mercator map dominated one wall, showing the world before the nukecaust had reshaped the coastlines of North America and other locales. The map was peppered with glowing locator dots, which were joined to one another with dotted lines of diodes, creating an image reminiscent of the kind of flight maps that airlines had given to passengers in the twentieth century. The indicated routes were not flight paths, however, but rather they showed the locations and connections of the sprawling mat-trans network. Developed for the US military, the majority of the units were located within North America, but a few outposts could be seen farther afield.
A separate chamber was located in one corner of the room, far from the entry doors. This chamber had reinforced armaglass walls tinted a coffee-brown color. Within was contained the Cerberus installation’s mat-trans unit, along with a small anteroom which could be sealed off if necessary.
Right now the mat-trans chamber was empty but the main ops room was buzzing with activity.
“Big one, too,” Philboyd said as he enhanced the satellite image on his screen, giving a wider view of the storm over British Columbia. Philboyd was a tall, lanky man who seemed somehow hunched over whenever he sat in the standard office furniture of the ops room. His blond hair was swept back and slightly receding while the skin on his cheeks showed evidence of acne scarring from his youth. Philboyd wore round spectacles with dark frames and was a physicist of some good standing. Like many of the personnel who populated the Cerberus redoubt, Philboyd was a transplant from the twentieth century, part of a research project that had been located on the Manitius Moon Base. After the nukecaust had struck, the moon base had gone into lockdown, plunging its staff into cryogenic deep freeze and retaining that expertise for another generation. It had taken a Cerberus exploration party to discover and relocate them to the redoubt.
Lakesh looked at the monitor screen where the satellite feed was playing out. It showed a desolate area of the territory that had once been Canada, around the point where Alberta met British Columbia. The area was white with fallen snow, a few clumps of trees visible as dark shadows on the ground. There was no sign of human habitation; any roads or tracks cutting through the land had been painted white with snow. In the midst of this desolate wasteland was a whirling blur of cloud, feeding the land with ice crystals. It was a small, isolated shower but it still covered several miles. “I didn’t expect the storm to still be raging,” Lakesh muttered, shaking his head.
“No housing nearby,” Philboyd observed, twiddling the image control dial to pull out farther from the storm. “Closest settlement is approximately ninety miles away. If this is your storm, it’s not affecting anyone other than the moose and squirrels.”
Lakesh rubbed his forehead, deep in thought. “Storms move,” he said. “Can we trace its path, backtrack to see if it has caused any devastation?”
Philboyd looked quizzically askance at Lakesh. “With respect, Doctor, I understood that what we were looking for was a past event. This storm is happening very much now.”
“It is,” Lakesh agreed, still thinking, “but hurricanes and tropical storms can rage for days, even weeks.”
Philboyd widened his search area, scanned for signs of devastation. There was nothing obvious—if the storm had destroyed anything it was obscured by the clouds.
Lakesh was still thinking, working through the possibilities in his incisive, analytical mind. “What are those clouds hiding, Mr. Philboyd?” he pondered.
Philboyd didn’t answer, but merely tapped a few commands into his computer keyboard and brought up a surveillance map showing the area. The map showed in a separate window on-screen and it was blank. “Nothing,” he said. “Just wilderness.”
Lakesh bent closer to the screen, studying the map. “Not wilderness,” he decided. “It’s too flat for that.”
“Sir?”
“Brewster—can we backtrack this image twenty-four hours, say?” Lakesh asked. He knew that they could; the satellite would have made a sweep over this area one day before. He was already beginning to suspect something, although he couldn’t put his finger on what.
Philboyd pulled up the records, ran the surveillance footage from one day before. Its time stamp glowed in the lower left corner as it played, moving slowly across the area which Lakesh and Philboyd were looking at now in a standard sweep. As it crossed the particular spot they had been observing, Philboyd let out a surprised laugh.
Lakesh did not laugh, however. What they were looking at, remarkable as it seemed, was what appeared to be the very same storm playing out in the very same spot.
“That’s one persistent storm,” Philboyd stated.
Lakesh pointed to the screen. “But not crossing here, or here,” he said. “It’s fixed to one location. Brewster—take us back another day.”
A few taps of his keyboard and Philboyd had called up the older footage. Once again, the storm was in the exact same spot. They went back further over the next two hours, checking the records going back not just weeks but months. The surveillance satellite had monitored this point every day as part of its routine sweep pattern, and every day showed the same clouds in place. On some days, it would be sunny around the storm, while on others it would be so cloudy all around that they could not pick out the specific clouds that made up the storm. But over time, Lakesh and Philboyd reached the somewhat unsettling conclusion that here, on one single point on the planet, the same storm had been playing out for not just months but possibly years.
“A never-ending storm,” Lakesh said with gravity. “Incredible.”
“But not impossible,” Philboyd stated. “The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is the eye of a gigantic storm—the largest in the solar system—and our records suggest it has run for centuries.”
“But on Earth, with our wind patterns and atmospheric changes...?” Lakesh wondered.
“A holdover from the nukecaust?” Philboyd proposed. The nuclear holocaust had done dreadful things to the Earth’s weather patterns. Holdovers were rare but they did occasionally happen, particularly in areas of high radiation.
Lakesh scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What else do we know about this area?” he asked aloud.
“Right now? Not a lot,” Philboyd confirmed. “There has been no reason to pay it particular scrutiny—”
“There’s your reason, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh said, pointing at the storm cloud on his screen. “Get scrutinizing.”
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, the team regathered in the meeting room, where Lakesh and Bry brought them up to speed with what had been discovered.
“The first reference to the coordinates appears in a backup database from Ragnarville, in a file dating back three and a half years,” Lakesh explained. “The reference is minor and the information attached to it encrypted—”
“The file encryption was a beast,” Donald Bry said, taking up the story, “and we had a lot of trouble getting past it. So much so that I decided to run a search on one of the other databases. To my surprise, the same file with the same encryption appeared on the database of Baron Cobalt.”
“Same encryption means no joy, I take it,” Grant observed sourly.
“But,” Lakesh said, “it meant something. If two barons were looking at the same data, it meant they were collaborating.”
Kane shook his head. “Where is all this going, Lakesh? The barons are dead now.”
“They are, but their legacy is still with us,” Lakesh pointed out. “And what Donald here discovered may be a rather big part of that legacy.”
“So pull the trigger already,” Kane said impatiently.
Bry paused for a moment before replying. “Baron Cobalt’s database was locked just like Ragnar’s, so I tried checking through the other baronial databases. In the Snakefishville database—now Luilekkerville of course—I found the same coordinates attached to something called Terminal White.”
“And who or what is Terminal White?” Brigid asked.
“That is a mystery,” Donald admitted, “but a fascinating one. Once we had the Snakefish link I could backtrack into the Ragnarville and Cobalt databases and look for a link. The phrase ‘Terminal White’ appears in all of them, relating to an area to the north of their territories. It would appear to be a shared project involving all three barons—at least—working together toward some undefined goal.”
“Three-way power grab, maybe?” Kane mused.
Brigid nodded warily. “Hmm, perhaps they were collaborating to take over the other baronies, then split them among themselves. And that all fell apart when the snake gods emerged, changing the stakes.”
“Not just the stakes,” Kane reminded her, “but the rules of the whole darn shooting match.”
Kane turned back to Bry and Lakesh, a look of concern on his face. “So, did you find anything else?”
Bry shook his head regretfully. “We’re still running checks, trying to burrow into the data. We’ve scanned the databases of each of the baronies, well, as much as we can access at this stage. We have the name or term, but everything else is encrypted like a ticking time bomb—if we push too hard we’ll wipe the data entirely.”
“And with a lot of that data already lost or ransacked after the fall of the baronies,” Lakesh said, “much of Donald’s information is already coming from old files that would be regarded as ‘lost.’”
“The data is very high-level security,” Bry added. “I suspect a lot of this information was carried person to person, baron to baron, and not stored on any database. What little we have uncovered is purely relating to the site, but the coordinates and the site match up both with each other and with the storm we’ve observed in satellite surveillance.”
“The barons are gone,” Kane said grimly. “Any research project they started should have shut down, too. Shouldn’t it?”
Brigid shook her head. “Kane, you know we’re going to have to look,” she said. “Don’t try to find a way out of it—that’s beneath you.”
Kane ground his teeth in irritation. “I want to protect people—not databases,” he muttered.
“They’ll come,” Grant told him. “They always do.”
Designated Task #011: Cleaning
Each resident of Ioville is expected to exhibit a professional level of cleanliness at all times. The cleanliness of the ville is paramount and is the responsibility of every citizen.
